Villa Aurora Events Archive
June 2025
Villa Aurora X Lookout FM Radio - Start of the series "if the house could speak"
Radio LOOKOUT FM
In January of 2025 the Palisades Fire came within feet of Villa Aurora. Miraculously, the house survived, and with it the radio transmitter that broadcasts from there throughout the Santa Monica Mountains and the beaches below.
This series explores the voices, past and present, that reverberate at Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger’s former home. For the past 30 years, Villa Aurora has been an artist residence, a place where exile and expression meet, where history and contemporary events converge.
During the process of rebuilding and awaiting our artists’ return, we will be broadcasting newly produced, archival and historical footage for you to listen to and maybe wonder: Is this really only a house or, like Carl Jung suggests, can the composition of a room induce the realization of new truths?
Each episode of if the house could speak will be broadcast on a loop for 24 hours with no interruption. The first episode will air Thursday, June 26th beginning at 12 PM Pacific Daylight Time. For our listeners across the world, that corresponds to 7 PM Coordinated Universal Time.
Episode 1
We begin the series with Marta Feuchtwanger’s own account of the Bel Air Fire that threatened to swallow the house and its library in 1961. In this chapter from her interviews with Lawrence Weschler, Marta remembers what it was like and how the books were saved during that time.
Recording courtesy of the UCLA Department of Special Collections.
Feuchtwanger Refreshed: THE FIRE LAST TIME
Marta’s introduction will be followed by three pieces written by student playwrights of the MFA Dramatic Writing Program at USC. Three pieces that take on different perspectives on home as a place and as a sanctuary for the displaced, resilience and finding uplift in times of desperation.
Presented by USC Feuchtwanger Memorial Library and Villa Aurora, performed at the Glorya Kaufman Community Center at the Wende Museum.
- The Fire Creates Its Own Storm From the Heat - by Eliza Kuperschmid
- Home is a Revolutionary Act - by Claire Bernstein
- Turtle and Blaze - by Collin Romero
In cooperation with
LOOKOUT FM is a West Coast terrestrial radio home for the broadcast of "transmission art:" experimental audio composition, modern serials, data sonification, radio plays, multi-day compositions, and radio-centric performances. Their licensed stations in Burbank, Hollywood, and Pacific Palisades function as FM exhibition spaces where radio art is presented without regard to constraints of time, structure, or commercial consideration.
Villa Aurora supports the Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival 2025
Los Angeles
The Glory of Life
LA Premiere
Saturday, June 28, 7:30 p.m. (PT)
Franz Kafka suffers from tuberculosis and is dependent on his overbearing family. In the summer of 1923, he meets Dora Diamant at a seaside resort on the Baltic Sea coast, where he is convalescing and she is working in a Jewish Volksheim. She embraces the indicative, he gets tangled up in the conjunctive. Together they go to Berlin and when Franz's health deteriorates rapidly, to a sanatorium in Austria. They are granted a single year together, a year that allows them to feel the glory of life.
Directed by Georg Maas and Villa Aurora Fellow 2020 Judith Kaufmann
Germany/2024/Drama/98 MinutesGerman with English subtitles
Q&A to follow the screening with Jeffrey High, leading international scholar on Kafka and Professor of German Studies at CSULB.
location:
Laemmle Town Center 5
17200 Ventura Boulevard #UNIT 121
Los Angeles, CA 91316
Plunderer
LA Premiere
Sunday, June 29, 7 p.m. (PT)
Historian Jonathan Petropoulos investigates the life of former Nazi art dealer Bruno Lohse, who became Hermann Göring’s personal collector in Paris, tasked with finding the most desirable works of art the Nazis stole from Jews.
With a look at stunning masterpieces and a deep archive of personal letters, Plunderer reveals the dark underbelly of the international art world.
Q&A to follow screening with subject in the film, historian Jonathan Petropolis and Randy Schönberg, subject of "Woman in Gold" and art restitution attorney.
location:
Museum of Tolerance
9786 West Pico Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90035
The Zweiflers
LA Premiere
Tuesday, July 1, 7 p.m. (PT)
This compelling series is a comic-dramatic, multigenerational saga following the travails of an extended Jewish family sorting out the future of its vast delicatessen empire in contemporary Germany. Symcha (Mike Burstyn), the patriarch of the Zweifler clan and a Holocaust survivor, is looking to sell off his deli business. Yet potentially damaging secrets from the past throw his future—and that of his children and grandchildren—into question and the Zweiflers’ present into disarray.
Episode 1 is directed by Villa Aurorora Fellow 2016, Anja Marquardt
Episode 2 is directed by Clara von Arnim
Starring: Mike Burstyn, Eleanor Reissa, Mark Ivanir, Sunnyi Melles
Germany/ Dramatic Series/2024/90 mins
German, English, Yiddish, Hebrew with English subtitles
location:
Museum of Tolerance
9786 West Pico Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90035